Named After a Library

The Wayback Machine turns 25 this week. Its early crawls came from Alexa Internet, a company named after the Library of Alexandria. Amazon bought it, gave the name to a speaker, and shut the original down.

The Wayback Machine turns 25 this week. The Internet Archive opened it to the public in late October 2001 with more than 10 billion pages already saved. By last October it had passed a trillion. The name comes from the time machine in Rocky and Bullwinkle.

A lot of those early pages weren't crawled by the Archive itself. Brewster Kahle, who started the Internet Archive in 1996, had also co-founded a company that April with Bruce Gilliat. It was called Alexa Internet, it ranked websites by traffic, and it crawled the web to do it. Those crawls went to the Archive and became the base of the Wayback Machine. Alexa was named in homage to the Library of Alexandria, on the idea that the internet could become that kind of store of knowledge. In 1998 it gave a two-terabyte copy of the web to the Library of Congress.

Amazon bought Alexa in 1999 for about $250 million in stock. In 2014, Amazon gave the same name to the voice inside the Echo speaker. In December 2021 it announced it was shutting the original down, and on May 1, 2022, Alexa Internet went dark. These days alexa.com is a landing page for Echo devices.

If you want to see what alexa.com used to be, the traffic rankings and the toolbar, type it into the Wayback Machine. The library is holding a copy.